Where Fibers Meet Fire

Three Years

Feel:

The shift in the guts

Like tectonic plates

     The little bright capsules stuck in colon mire, 

     In Pop-Art relief—they are

     Tiny stars that will burst into 

Even smaller blood jet-packs that will 

Zap and blast around the body--- 

        ---that fetid dark series of holes

along jet-stream capillaries ,

through ever-glacial strata of skin and bone

encircling Milky Way mucuses  (linings, packs, 

    Willingly, joyfully, leaving nothing behind.) 

Feel:

When the fatigue clutches in so tight 

You can’t turn over the engine of your brain—the sparks all positioned like synchronized swimmers, held just in the moment before jumping together into the pool, held perpetually in an old photo that wishes it were a film—

Perhaps your body is no longer your own

but instead, a gift to Osiris.

Four Years

My toes are all xylophone keys 

That the acupuncturist plays 

As she presses their pads 

And places the needles 

On the meridians,

“let me feel your pulses” 

And each toe zaps a tone 

in different 90’s Fisher Price colors

Up the spine and spreads across 

my scalp, lingers in the Temples 

Seven Years

Inside my intestines 

there are rosy court ladies 

with hairdos stacked 

pineapples high.

Just last week 

a session of Parliament

was held there,

rambling on and on

about levies 

and exit strategies.

I am hungry and thirsty 

and only hear 

quiet whisperings of their 

doings.

Inside my guts 

there are footmen and doorman 

who open and close doors 

with flickering secret trials masked and 

plastered on their faces.

I am delirious with wanting.

Thirteen Years

Learn to sit with uncertainty.

Silver bullets’ herald cries

ring deaf

in Cure’s tympanic canyons.

Though the aches, throbs and zaps

waft and wreathe —

a wraith on a winter’s eve—

tangled ancestral malaises

press into present

neuronal display:

there will be one day,

when distress signals dampen,

amplitudes shorten

or the signal changes frequency—

that clicking metronome of

temporal summation

swings above—

Be the wind playing over an Aeolian harp

with no attempt to know the tune.

Burst-breathe into bridges

where fiber meets bone

Let the fire play out

while you watch from below

with the radiant heat energy

of intergalactic suns

Let breath guide the movement

and its still rests between.

Don’t be a biological determinist:

for as your billions cells undergo mitosis,

one day you’ll be a different being

all the same